Complesso Museale di San Francesco

The cavernous ex-church of San Francesco, off the central Piazza del Comune, is now the Complesso Museale di San Francesco, housing the town’s big feature, Benozzo Gozzoli’s sumptuous fresco cycle on the life of St Francis. With Fra’ Angelico, Gozzoli was one of the most prolific and influential Florentine painters to come south and show the backward Umbrians what the Renaissance was all about. Resplendent with colour and detail, the cycle copies many of the ideas and episodes from Giotto’s Assisi cycle but, with two hundred years of artistic know-how to draw on, is more sophisticated and more immediately appealing.